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Salesforce.com Now Hiring by Happy Hour

A bold new recruiting process that seeks out self-aware, socially intelligent candidates allows Salesforce.com to hire more higher-caliber technology professionals 33 percent faster than in the past.

It started at the beginning of September 2012 with a challenge: Salesforce.com had plans to open an office in Portland, Ore., and the $4 billion software company needed to hire software developers to staff it. Lots of developers. More than 50. In a matter of weeks.

Todd Pierce, Salesforce.com’s executive vice president of operations and transformation, knew building a software development team for the new office wouldn’t be easy, what with competition for IT professionals intense throughout the industry and in the region. The company’s existing recruiting process, which often consisted of six, seven, or more rounds of interviews and weeks of deliberations, wasn’t going to make it easier. It typically took Salesforce.com from 53 to 80 days to fill an open position. The process simply wasn’t flexible or fast enough to handle the volume of professionals the company needed to hire in a short span of time.

So Pierce started thinking, “What about the hiring process impedes us? How can we overcome those obstacles?” He ticked through various activities associated with recruiting—formulating job descriptions, conducting interviews, coordinating feedback from interviewers—and concluded the process was fundamentally inefficient and ineffective.

“Too often, hiring managers write unrealistic job descriptions because they don’t have a clear idea of the capabilities they need, so they ask for everything,” observes Pierce. “Moreover, hiring managers and job seekers feel uncomfortable being themselves during formal interviews. The lack of authenticity makes it hard for each party to figure out whether there’s a good fit.”

John Henry, a technology industry director with Deloitte Services LP, acknowledges the shortcomings of traditional job interviews. “They rarely reveal candidates’ creativity, maturity, and social intelligence—the ability to negotiate complex social relationships and environments,” he says. “As a result, companies make costly mistakes. They hire people who may be technically competent, and who certainly are savvy interviewers, but once those individuals get on the job, hiring managers see how much trouble they have functioning day to day and working with other people.”

Pierce wanted to develop a new recruiting process that allowed hiring managers to better evaluate candidates’ social intelligence and on-the-job performance. He came up with the idea of staging a daylong recruiting workshop where hiring decision-makers can observe candidates working in teams on real-world problems facing Salesforce.com. He proposed the idea in an executive steering committee meeting mid-September.

“I laid out my vision and waited for people to say it was crazy,” says Pierce. “They didn’t know exactly what to think, but they agreed to try it, knowing our existing recruiting process would be too slow.”

A New Way to Recruit IT Professionals

To make job seekers aware of Salesforce.com’s hiring plans, Pierce had a video produced, informing prospective candidates of the company’s plans to open an office in Portland and its need for software developers.

Recruiters identified over 1,000 potential candidates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Craigslist, and sent the recruiting video to them, along with an invitation to attend a happy hour at a popular Portland pub to learn more about the job opportunities. Pierce says 120 people attended two happy hour events, held at the end of September. The events served to introduce candidates to Salesforce.com and its culture, and allowed hiring managers to begin assessing candidates for their social intelligence and potential cultural fit.

After the happy hour gatherings, recruiters, hiring managers, and executives selected 44 candidates to invite to the daylong workshop. They provided those candidates with access to Salesforce.com’s social collaboration technology, Salesforce Chatter, so candidates could connect with other job seekers and continue conversations with hiring managers prior to the workshop.

Salesforce.com held its first recruiting workshop on a Saturday in October 2012. The 44 candidates the company invited, along with Salesforce.com hiring managers, executives, and employees, showed up at 8:30 for breakfast. At 9 a.m., Pierce welcomed everyone, and candidates spent the first two hours learning about the Enneagram, a personal development tool that reveals individuals’ personality types and working styles. Pierce says the purpose of the Enneagram exercise was to provide prospective employees with insights into their strengths, development needs, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness.

Following the Enneagram training, workshop facilitators organized candidates into groups, since much of the work at the company is accomplished through teams. Each team was tasked with proposing a solution to a real-world challenge, such as redesigning the intranet, developing a mobile application for employees, and improving the company’s “order-to-quote” process. Later in the day, candidates had the opportunity to create their own teams, and their experience networking with each other on Chatter helped facilitate those gatherings. Each of the two team exercises lasted two hours.

Salesforce.com representatives observed as teams hashed out their challenges. They looked for individuals who worked well with others and demonstrated leadership, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness. At the end of the day, at 4 p.m., each team spent 30 minutes presenting their solution to Salesforce.com hiring managers and senior leaders.

As candidates headed home, the hard work began for Salesforce.com management: deciding which of the 44 candidates would receive offers. Pierce says having the hiring decision-makers in the same room, observing candidates at the same time, improved their decision-making.

“Five levels of management attended this event, from front-line managers to EVPs, and we collectively became smarter because we knew the qualities to look for and the traits that were deal breakers,” he says. “Because the decision-making took place on the same day as the observation, everyone had much better recall. It’s hard for hiring managers to make sound decisions when interviews have taken place four weeks prior.”

It Works!

Salesforce.com managers identified 14 candidates to whom they wanted to extend job offers. At 10 a.m. the following day, they called the 14 candidates and offered jobs to them. “We had 100 percent acceptance,” says Pierce.

The new recruits started their jobs two weeks later. “From our first hellos at the happy hour events to their first day on the job, the process of getting 14 people up and running as a team in a new office took just five weeks,” says Pierce. “Depending on the position, that’s at a minimum a 33 percent improvement in our time to fill.”

The new recruiting process has also reduced the time hiring managers need to invest by 18 percent, from an average of 27.5 hours to 22.5 hours. Salesforce.com estimates it will save roughly $2 million for every 100 employees it hires this way. And of the 14 people who were hired in October 2012 after the first workshop, 13 are still working for the company. Previously, one in five new hires left within their first year.

Salesforce.com now runs hiring workshops roughly every six weeks. To date, the company has offered 14.

Pierce says the experience transforming Salesforce.com’s process for recruiting technology professionals prompted him to reconsider the end-to-end employee experience at the company, from hiring to training and talent management. “We recently redesigned how we conduct performance reviews, give feedback, and show appreciation in the workplace,” he says. “We’re committed to making Salesforce.com a platform for our employees’ growth and development, and it starts with our hiring process.”

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